Jerome Taxy is a doctor by day and plays the viola at night

Pathology professor plays for the Highland Park Strings

Jerome Tax, who works at University of Chicago Medicine, has been playing for the Highland Park Strings since 1995. (Megan E. Doherty, Handout)

By day, Jerome Taxy is a mild-mannered doctor examining organs from dead bodies, reviewing slides under a microscope, analyzing tissue samples and more. It's all part of his job as a pathology professor and director of autopsy pathology at University of Chicago Medicine.

But after turning in his scalpels and stashing his supplies, the pathologist becomes something else entirely. It's not quite a super secret identity, but if that viola player in the Highland Park Strings looks a bit like Dr. Taxy, that's because it is.

The only practicing physician in the 35-person, community-based orchestra, Taxy's fellow viola, violin, cello and bass players range in age from 24 to 78 and include a retired attorney, teachers, a bicycle salesman, a public relations manager and a travel agent.

The accomplished amateur chamber musicians play free concerts throughout the year from a repertoire of more than 300 pieces from the likes of Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Elgar, Shostakovich, Bach, Haydn and Mozart.

Taxy, 67, joined the group about 15 years ago, starting out playing the cousin to the viola, the violin. It was an instrument he picked up when he first moved at the age of 9 from Chicago to a three-bedroom, split-level home in Highland Park that cost $22,000 in 1954.

"I liked it for about two weeks," he said of the violin.

But he thought, "I sounded like crap. … After a short time I really just wanted to get rid of it."

His parents wouldn't let him quit, so he struck a bargain with them that he could stop taking lessons if he joined the orchestra at Highland Park High School.

"I was pretty terrible," he said. But he managed to reach first chair by his senior year. Still, after graduating, he said, he put the violin in its case and didn't take it out again for more than a decade.

Taxy went on to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and then medical school at the school's Chicago campus before a stint in the Army, serving first at Fort Detrick in Maryland. He was assigned at the base to a research institute for infectious diseases.

Since he was not a researcher, he said, "I had nothing to do."

One day he was approached by a lab tech with a music degree who was looking to form an orchestra.

"He said, 'I heard you play the violin' … and asked me to play. I was so bored, I said yes."

He kept at it, practicing daily with music sheets propped up on an open dresser drawer, and eventually resumed lessons and started playing chamber music.

"It's like someone opened a door for me," he said. "I just loved it. From that point on, I became serious."

Taxy and his family returned to Highland Park in 1982 for a new job. He and his wife have two children, Ben, 38, and Cara, 36. And Taxy continued playing and taking lessons.

"My family was extremely tolerant," he says. "The sounds were pretty awful."

But he was good enough to pass the audition and joined the Highland Park Strings in 1995. He switched to viola three years later, which suits him better.

"I always liked the sound," he said of the new instrument. "It's almost like learning a different language. I love it. It's expanded my opportunities as a player."

Compared to the violin, the viola plays a supporting role by providing context, texture and rhythmic melodic support to a musical piece, he said.

And just as pathology fits his personality, so does the viola.

"The pathologist is in the background, but the diagnosis is made by the pathologist in many cases," he said. "I was very comfortable remaining in the background."

Playing the viola is much the same, Taxy said.

"As a musician, I'm not the one who's out in front. I'm in the background. I provide the support."

Strings founder and cello player Larry Block said Taxy brings much to the organization.

"He's a very competent violist," Block said, and it's evident how much he enjoys playing with the group. "He loves it not because he's compensated or expects any significant awards or publicity, and that's the spirit of a community orchestra."